A guide to gastronomy as a life force

A guide to gastronomy as a life force

Adam Gopnik, author of 'The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food,' with his wife, Martha, and their daughter, Olivia.Photo by
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Adam Gopnik, the American-born, Montreal-raised essayist for The New Yorker, has always been the kind of writer who makes me greedy.

Reading his stories for the magazine, or, more particularly, his engaging anthology Paris to the Moon, has sent me sneaking off to my room with a blanket, like a child with a basket of Easter candy she doesn’t want to share. I want things quiet when I read Gopnik, and I want time to think about what he says.

So it was with salivating excitement that I picked up my copy of his latest offering, a collection of essays titled The Table Comes First: Family, France and the Meaning of Food. In it, Gopnik, who spent five years as a correspondent for The New Yorker in Paris, examines food from many angles, including the local food movement, the restaurant trade, and what novelists are really saying when they put eating scenes in their books.

He ponders whether or not "afters" is an appropriate designation for dessert, as if it didn’t really matter, when, in fact, it does. And he argues, most convincingly, that the rituals of eating are what hold us together as a civilized society.

The name of the book comes from a 2004 interview Gopnik did with the famous British chef Fergus Henderson, who remarked that he could never understand why young married couples purchased televisions or sofas before equipping their dining room.

"Don’t they know the table comes first?" he said, and the query stuck in Gopnik’s mind.

In this case, the table is both a solid piece of furniture and a metaphor, "the one plausible hearth of family life, the raft to ride down the river of our existence even in the hardest times," writes Gopnik.

The table is not only where we come together to share daily dramas, small and large, with our parents, our children, our dear friends. It is also the place where we forge alliances with those with whom we might not normally have much in common, were it not for that bubbling bowl of creamy pasta that rests between us.

While good manners dictate that you offer your dining companion the bowl first, the gesture is also an opening, a way to say, "Tell me what you are thinking."

Graceful, thoughtful and humorous as always, Gopnik examines the current cultural obsession with food and eating in Western nations, and what it says about our humanity.

Here is an edited version of our February phone conversation from his home in New York, where the 55-year-old writer sat in the window seat of his apartment, overlooking Madison Avenue, sniffling with a miserable cold and yet politely and generously, answering all questions I directed his way.

Can you explain the current focus on food and eating that seems to dominate Western nations?

"I have some ideas. One is that food is not always cheap, but it’s one of the things that people can use as a form of luxury, even when expensive cars and giant houses are locked off from them. We can all, to some degree, cook well. That’s a small part.

"I think every period, every time, needs something that becomes its form of symbolic communication, saying who we are. When I was growing up as a kid in Montreal, the way we communicated our values was through music. That may still be a bit true among teenagers. But among grown-ups in North American society, we use food to articulate who we are. I joke sometimes that you go to somebody’s house to dinner and within 90 seconds of what they offer you, you know about their politics. If it’s locally grown organic carrots, with fleur de sel, you know instantly where these people stand on the social scale. That’s not true in the same way in France, where many of the people involved with slow food land on the political right — but whatever our beliefs are, we articulate them through food. In plain English, there are politics attached to food in the way they weren’t in our parents’ generation."

In our obsession with eating the right foods, politically or socially, do we miss something?

"Yes, I think we do. The notion that there is a right way to eat and by eating in the right way, we can save the planet, I think is overwrought.

"In my unduly chewy chapter on taste, I thought it was important to trace out how ideas about food change dramatically every 25 to 50 years. The one thing you can say for certain is that the right way to eat now is not going to be the right way in 50 years. So we have to have some modesty and irony about our own evangelical beliefs about what we have to eat.

"The tricky part that I struggled with is that it doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, you can’t shrug your shoulders and say, ’I don’t care about how chickens are treated.’ I care passionately, but I understand that I have to care in the context that our knowledge is limited, our values changes and our taste changes as well. I talk, jokingly, about the secret of life — that you have to have enough detachment about values to see their absurdity and enough attachment to see their value.

"The planet won’t be saved by slow food, but at the same time our commitment to slow food represents values we want to spread in the world. The one idea I would like people to take away from the book is that it’s important to put forward the values of the slow-food movement because it represents what we believe in — continuity, family, the planet. It’s a simple idea to have, but it’s a hard idea to articulate."

Can you give an example of how eating together has been a civilizing influence in history?

"Let me be religious for a moment. I admire Jesus in lots of ways even though I’m not a Christian. One of the things all the great New Testament scholars emphasize is that it was unprecedented — Jesus’s practice of keeping an open table. He would sit down with publicans, tax collectors, prostitutes, different clans and castes and he scandalized religious Jews around him by doing that.

One of the oldest depictions of Jesus is a Roman relief showing a meal — that notion of keeping an open table is very much at the root of what we think of as spiritual life."

Of what value has paying attention to the table been to you personally?

"Last night was Valentine’s Day. I was sick, felt awful, but my wife and I had had a minor tiff the night before and I wanted to have a nice Valentine’s for her.

"So I made her favourite meal, roast lemon chicken with a little bit of duck fat on top, cubed potatoes cooked up with the chicken fat, carrots with cumin and orange, and broccoli puree with creme fraiche and roasted shallots.

"And a garlic confit sauce. It’s her absolutely favourite meal, and though I was feeling really awful, I got it made and served to her with a nice New Zealand pinot noir, and everything was good. But it was a spiritual, not a sensual pleasure. The way we use food as a sign of love and a spiritual pleasure, that for me is the heart of what makes it matter."

Are there lessons of the table that you’d like people to understand, as we move into the future?

"Generally speaking, families who eat together on some kind of steady basis, their kids tend to do better in school and have less obesity problems. In the U.S., there is a lot of fast food and the overwhelming influence of corn syrup in our food. Home-cooked food is of necessity going to be healthier for kids than store-bought or fast food.

"I want to emphasize that I understand the pressures people are under to make those choices, and I hate to hear myself say everybody should eat at home as a family. I’m very privileged. I have an affluent life, and I’m a writer — I can stop work when I’m ready and cook dinner — but there are countless families who can’t do that, parents working two jobs. But I do think that the more that we emphasize the pleasures of the table, the rituals of the table, the healthier our kids will be.

"Though I love France, I don’t idealize it, and there is less childhood obesity in France because the choices given to them are healthier. One of my favourite images of France is of kids coming out of school and reaching for a pastry to recover from the demanding French school day.

"Treating food like a drug leads to problems of addiction and abuse. Treating food like a pleasure, on the whole, leads to good health. Food is sold and pushed in the most aggressive way as a drug in this culture."

If you could have a meal with anyone, living or dead, who would it be? What would you eat?

"I know instantly. It would be a friend, Kirk Varnedoe, who was someone who loved Paris with a passion. I wrote a story about the last year of his life in Through the Children’s Gate. He was my dearest friend and he tragically died much too young, and I miss sharing pleasures with him, and one of the keenest is the pleasures of the table.

"If only I could get him back for one day, what he would most enjoy would be the brasserie food of France. I’d like to go with him to have a jarret de porc, which is a ham hock with lentils. When I summon him to mind, it’s a jarret de porc, and a good, fruity Beaujolais and maybe an apple tart for dessert. In Paris, we used to tour a cathedral and then have lunch. Those were about as happy days as I can remember."

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